The dominant feature of Government Center is the enormous, imposing, and brutalistBoston City Hall,[1] designed by Kallmann McKinnell Woods and built in the 1960s as part of Boston's first large Urban Renewal scheme. While considered by some to have architectural merit, the building is not universally admired, and is sharply unpopular among locals. Furthermore, it is resented for having replaced the Victorian architecture of Boston's Scollay Square,[2] a lively commercial district that lapsed into squalor in the Twentieth Century.[3]

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building is a United States government office building. It is located across City Hall Plaza from Boston City Hall. An example of 1960s modern architecture, it consists of two 26 floor towers that sit on-axis to each other and a low rise building of four floors that connects to the two towers via an enclosed glass corridor. The two towers stand at a height of 118 metres (387 ft).

City Hall Plaza is not a well-loved space, either. As Bill Wasik wrote in 2006, "It is as if the space were calibrated to render futile any gathering, large or small, attempted anywhere on its arid expanse. All the nearby buildings seem to be facing away, making the plaza's 11 acres (45,000 m2) of concrete and brick feel like the world's largest back alley. … [It is] so devoid of benches, greenery, and other signposts of human hospitality that even on the loveliest fall weekend, when the Common and Esplanade and other public spaces teem with Bostonians at leisure, the plaza stands utterly empty save for the occasional skateboarder…"[4] The plaza is often colloquially referred to as "the brick desert."[5]

Another very large Brutalist building at Government Center, less prominently located and thus less well known than City Hall, is the Government Service Center, designed by architect Paul Rudolph. The building is unfinished as the tall central tower in the original plan was never built. In the mid-1990s, the adjacent space was filled with the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse, which houses a division of the Boston Municipal Court. This irregularly shaped, sloping lot was the last parcel to be developed of the Government Center urban renewal plan; in the interim the space was used as surface parking. In a 2014 article, architectural historian Timothy M. Rohan praised the building for having "a wondrous interior courtyard like something from baroque Rome, a space that even in its incomplete and neglected state contrasts sharply with nearby City Hall and its alienating plaza." [6]

This 720,000 square foot office and retail structure, built by developer Norman B. Leventhal, is across Cambridge Street from City Hall Plaza. In 2014, the property was sold[13] by the Blackstone Group to Shorenstein.[14] Shorenstein has proposed a $25 million renovation[15] designed "to add some new buzz" to the building.[16] The renovation was approved by the Boston Redevelopment Authority in 2016.[17]

Other maps and documents show a variety of different boundaries for Government Center. The Boston Zoning Code has a map called "1H Government Center/Markets District."[20] The map shows the Government Center portion of the district extending as far west as the Massachusetts State House and including all of the major structures listed in this article. The Boston Redevelopment Authority map of "Urban Renewal Areas"[21] includes a somewhat smaller area that excludes the McCormack and Saltonstall Buildings.

By contrast, a search for "Government Center" on Google Maps[22] yields a map showing an even smaller area that is bounded by Court, Cambridge, Sudbury, and Congress Streets. The AirBnB neighborhood map[23] shows a somewhat larger area than the Google Map.

Scollay Square station opened as part of the third phase of the Tremont Street Subway in September 1898, bringing subway service to the area with a stone headhouse in the center of the square. Court Street station opened on the East Boston Tunnel in December 1904; it was closed in 1914 and replaced by a lower level (Scollay Under) to the Scollay Square station in 1916.[24] The station was rebuilt in 1963 as Government Center station with a low brick headhouse, and again from 2014-2016 with a large glass headhouse that dominates the south side of the plaza.[25] It serves as the transfer point between the MBTA's Blue and Green Lines.

Boston-based seminal proto-punk band The Modern Lovers recorded a song called "Government Center". It was originally released on Beserkley's Chartbusters sampler album. It has been included in re-release versions of The Modern Lovers album. In it, singer Jonathan Richman humorously croons about his intent to "Rock non-stop tonight at the Government Center" to "Make the secretaries feel better / As they put the stamps on the ledgers." The song appears in the film Harmony and Me.